Death's Lullaby
by kirin-saga
Summary: Blaster was an artist. Most never realize. Prowl, however, could not forget.


**Title: Death's Lullaby  
Author: kirin-saga  
Rated: PG-13  
A/N: Sequel to the last prompt in part six of the fic meme.  
Summary: Blaster was an artist. Most never realize. Prowl, however, could not forget.  
______________________________**

Sunstreaker's art always had the viewer feeling as if they could reach out and touch the subject. As if they could feel the warm, smooth metal of the models and pull them from the canvas. This was an effect only accomplished by the most skilled of artists. Artists who spent countless vorns perfecting technique and style were the only ones who could make a painting come alive like this and the public loved them for it. Prowl could understand that; even he could spend joors just staring at some of his favorite art pieces. Sunstreaker truly did beautiful work.

But Prowl rarely allowed himself to think too hard about artists themselves. Sunstreaker was rude, narcissistic, entirely too difficult to deal with that those that met him for the first time were shocked to learn that _this _was the famous artist who created such beautiful masterpieces. Sunstreaker was not what people expected and the same could be said of every other artist in existence. No, Prowl did not like to think of artists. Because that train of thought always lead him to the locked cabinet in his quarters, where he had hidden the large drawing a bright and cheerful and disturbing sparkling had proudly given him so many vorns ago.

The drawing Blaster had given him was even more frightening now than it had been then. Now when he looked at it, he didn't see a rapidly blackening nameless green world, he saw Earth. Where once he saw simply armies of red and purple, he saw Autobots and Decepticons. And Cybertron... beautiful and shining Cybertron was now as dead as it was in the picture. Prowl always stared at the drawing when he got to thinking too hard about the war. Sometimes, he imagined that the faceless dead on the paper grew familiar features, calling out in despair with familiar voices. And Prowl was scared now as he was then of the disturbing child.

Blaster had never drawn another picture like this, from then on only drawing things a normal sparkling would draw. Bright and cheerful things. But the songs he hummed then were always dark and depressing. A quiet dirge for whatever smiling creature he was drawing. It was obvious that he hadn't wanted to draw happy things.

When asked, Blaster had told him that he didn't like 'normal' drawings because they didn't feel right to him. That it felt like something that was pounded into his head with a hammer, instead of slipping in on a pleasant song like the darker images did. Prowl had never asked again.

After a while Blaster had stopped drawing happy things, had stopped drawing all together. At least on paper. Now he painted with sounds, drawing audiences in with melody and rhythm. Trapping them in worlds of his own creation until he chose to end the song. End the song, but never finish it. Prowl was afraid of what would happen if Blaster ever decided to _finish _a song.

Blaster could do with sound what Sunstreaker could do with paint and canvas; he could create a world that the listener felt connected to. Audiences were pulled into dreams, could feel sensations they had never experienced, meet people who had never existed. And no one ever experienced the same thing as anyone else.

Prowl always experienced the same thing, no matter which song he listened to. It was always the battlefield from Blaster's first drawing. Only now there was more detail, more physical sensations. No longer could he 'almost' feel as if he were standing amongst the dead on an energon soaked battlefield; now he was actually there, shivering in the cold wind, trying not to look too closely at the dead as he stumbled over them in an attempt to reach nonexistent safety. Tried not to recognize friends as they lay scattered and broken. And he tried very hard to ignore his own face, own corpse, as he tripped over it for the third time.

Prowl knew there was something very wrong with Blaster. He used to worry about whether the sparkling was a sociopath in the making, or if he simply didn't understand what he was drawing and was simply reproducing something he had seen in an old holovid.

Now though, Prowl wondered whether Blaster was predicting the future, or if he was creating it.


End file.
